Flash of 404 page when redirecting to external sites

[wgao19]

problem

The following two things don't work well together:

• 404 page
• we have a few redirects that we can use as short links, i.e., reactknowledgeable.org/speak will short link to our talks repo

lines of thoughts on solution

Originally I was hoping to "just solve" the issue, i.e., make it not display the 404 page and therefore would be a white screen, and the URL magically changes to the external link and it redirects.
Then as I read the issue in Gatsby's repo I realize we should probably create a redirect page (maybe using the same logo with 404, replacing the text)

references

our code

• our call of createRedirect
• our 404 page

resources

• there's an open issue regarding this Gatsby doesn't redirect in the browser on the initial render which means a 404 is temporarily shown gatsbyjs/gatsby#5329
• Gatsby docs on 404 page
• Gatsby docs on createRedirect

[huijing]

Graphic for redirect page

RK302.svg.zip